Abstract
After the transition to university, students need to build a new peer network, which helps them to adapt to university life. This study investigated to what extent students’ prosocial attitudes and academic achievement facilitate the embeddedness in friendship and help-seeking networks, while taking structural network characteristics into account. Participants were 95 first-year bachelor’s degree students and were part of learning communities consisting of 12 students at a university in the Netherlands. Measures included student-reports of prosocial attitudes, peer nominations of friendship and help-seeking networks, and officially registered grades (GPA). Longitudinal social network analysis, stochastic actor-based modeling with the package RSiena, revealed that both students’ own prosocial attitudes and achievement played a role in their friendship formation, whereas only students’ own achievement made the formation of their help-seeking relationships more likely. When students were friends, it was more likely that they approached each other for help and vice versa. Similarity in achievement level contributed to relationship formation in friendship and help-seeking networks. Overall, the results underscore the importance of both student’ prosocial attitudes and achievement for their social adjustment (i.e., making friends) and only achievement for their academic adjustment (i.e., seeking help) during the first year of university within the context of small-scale teaching.
Highlights
After the transition to university, students need to build a new peer network, which helps them to adapt to university life
The Jaccard index revealed that 38% of the friendships and 36% of the help-seeking relationships were stable, denoting sufficient stability in the networks to estimate the parameters with adequate statistical power (Ripley et al 2020; Snijders et al 2010)
Since including the interaction terms complicated our models and could overrule the main effects of prosociality and achievement, we reported the models for friendships and help-seeking without this interaction effect to get a better understanding of the role of prosociality and achievement
Summary
After the transition to university, students need to build a new peer network, which helps them to adapt to university life. The results underscore the importance of both student’ prosocial attitudes and achievement for their social adjustment (i.e., making friends) and only achievement for their academic adjustment (i.e., seeking help) during the first year of university within the context of small-scale teaching. To address this research gap, this study adopted a social network approach to investigate the role of students’ prosocial attitudes and academic achievement in establishing friendship and help-seeking networks during the first year of university. This study provides insights into the role of student’ characteristics in facilitating their social adjustment (i.e., making friends) and academic adjustment (i.e., seeking help) during the first year of university, and may help target interventions aimed at improving students’ successful completion of university. When students are not integrated well in friendship networks, which can be considered as an indicator of maladaptive social adjustment (Mahon et al 2006), they may be at increased risk of withdrawal from social and academic activities, and eventually dropout of university
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